How to write good product management fiction
PRFAQs and the speculative product manager
Every product manager writes fiction.
We do it every day in plans, roadmaps, PRDs, and even acceptance criteria. These are statements of what we’d like to see in the future but aren’t things that exist yet.
Unfortunately, this fiction tends to be boring and not very inspirational.
There is room for improvement in how we write these documents. Science fiction, speculative futures, design fiction, role playing games, and worldbuilding all offer us a way to create better documents. We need them to be vivid, inspirational, aspirational, and motivational for the cross-functional teams we work with.
These plans also need to be provocations on how we might question the status quo that is today. We need to ask how we might, as a team, move forward and make sure it is the right change. Through provocation we can understand what is really important to our organizations, our customers, and ourselves.
This article is the first in a series of how to use and apply more speculative practices to the product management field. I’d like to start with the first place I realized this: PRFAQs.
PRFAQs as speculative fiction
There are two key sections of the PRFAQ: 1) the press release (PR) that talks about a future state of the world where our product helps someone, and 2) the frequently asked questions (FAQ) that people inside and outside the organization might have. Ideally, these documents are no longer than six pages but there are plenty of anti-patterns that make them huge documents. For a deeper dive into why Amazon has embraced this type of document see the book Working Backwards.
After spending some time learning about the format, using it, and advising others I think it is a great way for product managers to get alignment on a project before starting talking about how we might execute it. I see it as a replacement for what PMs would call “one pagers” that really end up being a super-short version of the PRD you want to write eventually.
Specifically, it helps build a shared understanding of the customer segment, the problem we want to solve, how we might solve it, and the benefit that is gained by solving that problem.
For our team the standard comm-heavy PR was hard to land well. We shipped a lot of products for internal use so the PR voice and artifact always seemed off. It shouldn’t be a polished PR that just regurgitates the product’s features. More often than not people would forget to include the customer in the PR at all and just list features.
This is when I started to consider other types of “fiction” that could take the place of a fake PR. We have experimented with developer blog posts, internal newsletters, conference announcement transcripts, and even emails from one VP to another thanking them. I started to think that these PRs are really any type of speculative fiction about how our work has impacted the world.
To get the reader to adopt the right mindset we really need to adopt the format of the artifact you are simulating. Pull in the header for the blog or make it look like an email in Gmail. The voice of the content is important but the feel of it matters a lot to set the expectations people will have for it.
It was getting closer to design fiction than a shortened specification.
Getting provocative to get strategic
However, I’ve found that these PRFAQs are usually not enough of a provocation to be considered a “diegetic prototype.” I’ve found that the PRFAQ rarely points at the debates that need to happen in the team. They don’t usually talk about the negative consequences or externalities if the feature ships. They tend to be very positive and optimistic about the world the project exists within.
A way to address this was to include what is referred to as “rude Q&A” in the FAQ. Asking hard questions about why this project exists, how it is different from something similar, why we should fund it, etc. creates a type of debate.
In a discussion with Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory during their office hours he recommended adding commentary on top of the more polished press release:
It is generally written by a press officer that has no incentive to write anything controversial… I would use it [as a design fiction archetype] with a thin level of irony… Back in the day it would have been the newspaper clipping paper clipped to the press release… If a VP said: “did you see this… what is our response?! Let’s go to the war room!”
This led me to fiction that might allow for more commentary. A forwarded internal newsletter that opens with a casual and direct highlight of the feature from one person to another. Or a polished press release being redlined by someone in the company with scathing feedback. This would allow people inside the organization to metaphorically roll their eyes, question the shininess of the statements, be concerned with the legality of the statements, and even show how politics might play internally alongside the more idealized statements.
We always need to push to have hard conversations (and document them for others) when we are proposing a new functionality. What matters the most is the conversation and discourse when trying to decide if something is worth investing in. We can do this by getting more controversial in the statements we make in artifacts like the PRFAQ and help show resolution as a statement of agreement when moving forward.
How to fit everything together in the (epic) story that is your organization
While this method works great for singular PRFAQs there is a larger world that you are trying to piece together as a team. When every product or feature needs a PRFAQ you start to get collections of these documents. But how well do they fit together?
I’ve started to think about the way that we connect these PRFAQs to a larger world that we want to build. This is a lot like a fictional worldbuilding practice where a writer builds lots of background across PESTEL factors for the world before writing the smaller story for each feature. Each PRFAQ is one of those stories that points to a larger world we want to build through our strategy.
In the future, I’m looking to validate the different stories within a bigger world of the vision and strategy that we create to motivate and help the team make better decisions.
I think you will find that if you take care in using PRFAQs as a piece of fiction that is meant to be motivational and inspire debate you will do a much better job than a regular 1-pager, mini-PRD. Try it out and let me know how you fare.
I’ve also recently written some (organizational) design fiction. You can check out this (fictional) Google Chrome Extension review from the near future where you have generative AI Siskel and Eberts critiquing your meeting.
